Social media activism for Indigenous land rights
Alana Kipnis describes her project on the media strategies Maasai communities use to resist land evictions in Loliondo.
June 7, 2022 was a bad day to live in Loliondo. Hundreds of government security personnel stormed the town and demarcated 1,500 square kilometers of Maasai territory that they planned to evict residents from. The Maasai are a pastoralist tribe in Tanzania and Kenya that live near the Ngorongoro and Serengeti National Parks. Security shot and tear gassed Maasai who resisted, injuring at least 40 people (Amnesty International). Community members were forced to flee their homes and hide in the wilderness. Those who remain in the demarcated areas live without essential resources and under the threat of being pushed off their land in the near future.
When indigenous communities are pushed off their land and their resistance is met with police repression, what tools do they have at their disposal to fight back? Maasai have employed creative solutions to spread awareness and put pressure on the government by bringing this issue to the global stage.
Tanzania’s government is more responsive to pressures from global attention rather than national attention, specifically when it comes to their tourism industry and relationships with international organizations. Maasai have been creating YouTube videos with firsthand accounts and documentation of protests that have spread across the internet and evenmadeinternationalnews.
As part of the Global Media Lab, I am leading a research initiative to study the media strategies that Maasai pastoralists are using to fight back against land disposition in Tanzania. Building on the month I spent conducting research in Tanzania this summer, I will be documenting existing media strategies through interviews with experts and online research. I will also be working with Maasai communities to develop and test new media messages to see what is most effective.
Over the Fall 2024 semester, I have conducted a deep dive into social media accounts used by Maasai and their allies and developed a typology of messaging strategies with a particular focus on activists’ choice of mediums (video, image, audio), message frames (human rights, conservation, state oppression), and message content (individual stories versus data-focused reporting).
As part of this research, our team has spoken with a variety of leaders in human rights activism in Tanzania. Our qualitative interview subjects include Roland Ebole, a human rights activist with Amnesty International from Kenya, about the types of influence the Tanzanian government is most likely to respond to and how the current issue is well reported but has yet to translate to policy change. We have also spoken with Human Rights Watch’s Oryem Nyekoabout about the challenges to getting the Maasai community’s message to spread outside the country.
Finally, we have spoken to Joseph Oleshenguy, a Maasai human rights attorney and activist and leader ofMISA, about the challenges faced by their organization due to government threats and censorship, and the importance of maintaining connections with journalists and media outlets and potential security risks associated with sharing information on social media, suspicious encounters with journalists and police officers, and how to proceed with this project.
Our next step is to continue to expand the database of media content employed by Maasai communities and carry out A/B tests to understand which strategies are most effective at attracting and persuading international audiences. Our ultimate goal is to help Maasai activists develop a cost-effective media strategy to pressure the government into policy change.